


Better Now

by b3lladonny



Category: RWBY
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, anyway, oops my hand slipped, this is lowkey depressing as hell, u ever get possessed by victor hugo?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-05-14 00:42:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19262506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b3lladonny/pseuds/b3lladonny
Summary: Blake has been running away for a long, long time and Yang breaks noses late into the night and stares at white ceilings by day. Neither of them believe too much fairy tales and fantasies, but there's something really cathartic of being needed as something that's not a punching bag, as well as being loved--truly loved--by a person that really cares for you.





	1. THE DEEP END I.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there, it's me. I ran across this story (really really old) and I lost my mind immediately and just started rewriting it with a sudden spark of motivation. The story's format is really strange tbh. It's divided into chapters with different parts, so, just as an example: The Bees Are Canon can be a chapter title but it'd have I, II, III, etc. parts that continue under it! Don't ask why because all I remember about first writing this was that I was on a flu medicine high. Anyway, I hope you enjoy Better Now :')

The morning was drab and dreary; filled with large clumps of grey clouds stretched along an even grayer sky. The concrete was wet, the windows were covered with raindrops, and the sky carried on without a second glance at the world it cried on. Such was the cycle of life: brief acknowledgement followed closely by abandonment. It is quite the peculiar thing—abandonment. It evokes something primal and savage within humans. For reasons personal to our own, we begin needing to want company and wanting to need love; loving to be cared for, caring to be wanted for. It is a cruel tongue twister: hard to pronounce and even harder to swallow. 

The abandoned tend to all begin in a dark space which we’ll refer to as memory. They sit hunchbacked, their eyes sunken into their heads, hearts split across their sleeves, breathing in the scent of bygone necessities such as lovers. They relapse into what could have been and live in a sort of limbo where everything is nothing and nothing is everything; where common sense is commonly ignored; they take in completely what should be ignored and find that it's much, much easier to drown out the world in white noise. They follow their battered hearts before their weary minds and continue onward in a haze of insecurity and hyper awareness. They avoid mirrors and cling to purposeless items; their eyelids are heavy, their shoulders sag, and yet they still continue. The abandoned are a particularly pathetic bunch with the outward appearance of the common civilian and the inward appearance of a broken machine. Their gears are rusted, un-oiled, and in need of overdue maintenance. However, because of their composed facade, not many know they are broken and bending and rusting at their edges. They smile and the world carries on, unaffected by the turmoil that broil beneath their skins. 

When they graduate from memory, they enter the second stage of hell: acceptance. They are overcome by uncertainty, and the weight of all they have lost finally settles upon their collapsing shoulders. They deflate furthermore and the important pieces that make them up are lost in a whirlwind of doubt. They crumble inward like old cathedrals left to the will of time. Their stained windows shatter as flora break through them, and the walls that were once indestructible become thin, fragile, naive. 

There, they succumb to the final stage where their broken and beaten forms become afraid of their shadows leaving them, and for this very reason they are in a constant state of anxiety. They swivel their heads when their shadows disappear and glower at the sun, which to them is much too bright. They begin to focus more on the dread in their persons than the people around them, trying in every way possible to tame that horrible, growling, dark beast that resembles much too closely a feral wolf. To them there are no stars, just endless, better possibilities. The world that they become trapped in is one of 'what-ifs' and not 'what-is,' 'dreaming' instead of 'taking action.' There is too much. There is too little. There is nothing, and there is everything. They pace back and forth, even after they've broken their floors. The abandoned attract certain people, and sooner or later they find themselves in the shattered iris of another, where the pieces they once believed they'd lost return to them little by little. 

Until it happens all over again.


	2. THE DEEP END II.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've figured it out. Victor Hugo possessed me as I was writing this so bear with me and this weird style.

In five weeks' time, the apartment will begin to stink of rotting food, but for now the muffled scent of lavender still clings to the peeling wallpaper. The shadows of raindrops are splattered across the wilting floorboards and the curtains, once black, have collected so much dust that it has turned a dark grey. The violet walls sink heavily into the grey melancholy (the holes punched through the drywall are also a rather lovely shade grey) and the yellowing plants that rest by the window survive yet another day without water. All the doors have been flung open and clothes, mixtures of purples and whites and reds and blacks, are scattered in piles lining the carpeted bedroom. The balcony door has been locked from the outside--barred by a whimsy plastic chair and half broken broom stick.

But the neighbors will continue on and, for the most part, never realized anybody had lived in that sad, pitiful room--or that anybody had disappeared. They'll walk the halls oblivious, and by the off chance they count the numbers etched on the doors as they pass, they'll have read as followed: one hundred ninety-nine, two hundred, two hundred two, two hundred three, two hundred four...Two hundred one will not exist to the neighbors, and by proxy, neither will the woman that lived within it. Is she a ghost? Does she exist? For all we know, she is a cat shoved roughly in a box, neither dead or alive, and for all the neighbors know, she'd only ever been a shadow.

And so they shuffle to and fro in the grey, grey, bustling city of Vale, ignoring the box as well as the paradoxical cat trapped within it. Questions like 'Is she dead?' and 'Is she alive?' are swept away in a whirlwind of 'where should I get my coffee?' and 'where did I put my keys?' It was trivial to the neighbors. Trivial to the cat. Trivial to the box, the sky, the crow perched on the windowsill, and the man hiding in the shadows. Did it matter whether the cat was alive? Did it matter whether she was dead? Did it matter whether or not the box was to be opened or not? And where the hell did I put the morning paper? It was all trivial to them. There is nothing more important to the people than routine, and oh how routinely ignorant they are. Nobody ever saw the inhabitant of two-o-one. Not anymore, at least. 

It wasn't until the morning of the second week, fourteen days after the cat had been boxed, that anybody had set out looking for her. A grandmother that lived on the third floor, ventured down to the second with the urge to find out where her chess companion had disappeared to. Even she, who knew the room number, skipped past the door by accident. One ninety-nine, two hundred, two-o-two, two-o-three, two-o-four. Eventually, after much pacing back and forth, she manged to differentiate the door from the wall and stood before it like Heracles did to the gates of the underworld. She fixed her smock, wrung her wrinkled hands, and knocked on the door of Limbo. The grandmother waited patiently for a minute, two minutes, three, five, fifteen, before she turned around and creased another wrinkle onto her forehead. When she looked away, the door had disappeared, and in a panic, she stumbled into a shadow and hurried away. The grandmother's frequent visits to the silent room soon caught the attention of the immediate neighbors, and before long, they too had begun to worry about the disappearance of the woman living within the room. 

The grandmother continued to knock every day on the sad, wooden door when she passed, but she would never receive an answer. There was a day where she'd heard shuffling, but she blamed the shadow for following her too closely. The immediate neighbors later informed her that at night they could hear the muffled sobs of two-o-one. The grandmother would turn away dejectedly after sparing a glance over her shoulder at the empty hallway. 

None of them, not even the grandmother, however, understood the circumstances of the woman's grief or what later became of her. She was gone like she'd arrived--quietly; under the roar of a thunderstorm. One day, the door to the room had been flung open and, simply put, the apartment room was emptied. The wallpaper had been stripped to the drywall, the carpet and wooden flooring had been ripped completely from the ground and stacked precariously in front of the balcony door, and the furniture had all been shoved into the kitchen. Now, there was only concrete, shag, and the faded smell of lavender. 

Then there was the man. He'd lingered so quietly outside of the door that the grandmother often times mistook him as the living shadow of the grandfather clock perched at the end of the hall. He dressed nice, smelled only of pungent antiseptic, and always without fail greeted her with the same cold smile whenever she made her morning rounds. He was always in the same spot. Always, always, always--smiling, watching, plotting. She'd always wondered who he was and what his relation to the woman was, but she'd never been brave enough to ask him. The day she'd worked up the courage she asked was the day she'd stared a beast in the eyes. 

"Young man, how did you know the lady in the room?" Innocent banter. She'd felt that she deserved an answer at the least. 

When he smiled, cold sweat broke onto her back. "She's mine." 

"Yours?"

"Mine. My lover."

"I see." She said while she did, in fact, not see or understand in anyway what he had said. It was Greek to her, and, unfortunately, she didn't speak it; because if she had, her reaction would have been much, much different.

It's a shame she never saw the box in his hand, crushing the cat, making sure that it died. I'd like to think that she would've helped. Instead, she smiled when he smiled, even when her skin broke into pimples and her blood ran cold with fear. What a lovely, caring young man, she thought, unaware that the woman had believed that as well, long, long ago.

So who was he? What had he been doing lingering about the halls in the middle of the nights? And why was he obsessed with the dirt on the doorknob? Those were trivial questions with...much too complicated answers, but we will explore that, slowly, in time. But first, the woman. I believe her name was Blake...


End file.
